01

We have started hosting a meetup at our base the Ranch for people interested in using Processing, the programming environment designed for artists and visual thinkers.

I’ve put off learning Processing properly for years, but having recently got excited by casual ambient games such as Osmos, Processings’ capacity to export to Android, I have decided to get stuck in.

I’ve been learning how to use multitouch on Android, thanks to Akeric’s excellent blog, documenting his experiments.

I’m currently working with a group of young adults at the Black-E where we are developing cooperative mobile games, more specifically taking the classic game of Pong & turning it upside down.
In the middle distance, I’ll be using it to develop tools for the Flunstellas project, exploring approaches to visualising our minds as complex agent systems. Processings’ relative ease of use and the community surrounding it, make it the obvious tool with which to construct the projects emergent, collaborative methodologies.
I had been talking about all this to the rest of Re-Dock & John had suggested why not set up a general Processing Meetup.
I had thought that the excellent documentation surrounding Processing might make face to face Meetups unnecessary. But after a cup of tea, we came to the conclusion that there might be a lot of people around, who were either curious, or had an idea in the back of their minds for a Processing based project and needed a bit of a push to get on with it.
Also, these kinds of Meetups are often centred around some kind of techie guru/teacher/figurehead character and although whilst learning the basics, I have covered my tracks pretty well, I am no Processing guru. I took heart thought, from the way that the SYNTAX events have opened out the process of researching new projects to a wider public at their inception, not as they are coming to a close.
The first Meetup was well attended, with the most positive thing being the range of different things that people were looking to use Processing for, Ascii video, augmented snooker, mobile games and infinite films amongst other things. Future Liverpool Processing Meetups, which will be taking place at the Ranch on the last Monday of each month,

If you are already using Processing, then come and show us what you are doing with it, if you would like to learn, then come and learn it with us.